Releasing the Notes

I wrote about Dave Grohl earlier this week, he is just an amazing person. This book tracks his life through music, from drumming on pillows in his bedroom, to his first tour, to drumming for Nirvana, and then landing with the Foo Fighters. He handles themes of reaching for your dreams, dealing with loss, balancing work and family, and finding your place. This was written before the death of Foo Fighter’s drummer Taylor Hawkins, and it was hard to read about their close friendship knowing what would soon happen.

Honestly, one of my all-time favorite books. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and pick it up.

Tara grew up in the mountains of Idaho, her family was living as off-the-grid as they could. In her family, family was all that mattered. In an effort to be as self-sufficient as possible, they were not allowed to go to school, hospitals, or any place where the government could learn about them. Tara began to have an interest in learning, and when no one else would teach her, she began teaching herself.

She applied for college, and it was there that she first learned about things others thought commonplace- like Civil Rights or the Holocaust. Her quest for knowledge takes her to Cambridge, and from across the world she has to come to terms with what family really means to her.

This book was wildly popular the year it came out, and has been featured on bestselling lists and book of the year lists for just about anyone who makes the lists.

When a dead body was found in an old camper bus in the wilds of Alaska (not a spoiler, it says he dies right on the cover of the book), Jon Krakauer had to know the story behind the man. He learns all he can about Alexander Supertramp, and interviews anyone who he can find who ever met the man.

Alexander, really named Christopher McCandless, was an idealist who rebelled against his rich upbringing. After graduating college, he donated all of his money to charity and bummed his way across the country, eventually deciding that he needed to put his survival skills to the true test – by living alone for a year in the Alaskan wilderness.

This book is oddly inspiring, even after learning that he dies in the attempt, I was still ready to go on some epic adventure of my own after reading this.

Spearhead is the story of a tank crew on the front lines of World War II. As they pushed into enemy territory, they had to face many of the brutalities of war, from death to killing, to encountering innocents in the midst of a gunfight.

Adam Makos knows that the stories of war don’t end when the war is over, though. He follows the gunner through his efforts in returning to life post-war, and all that goes along with it. After years of being home, he is still haunted by things he did in war, one death in particular. After obsessing over learning everything he can about the woman, why she was on the front lines, and whose bullet took her life, he realizes the toll the war has truly taken on him.

A great view of the brotherhood built with teammates, the brutalities of war, PTSD, and the long-term effects of violence.

When Solomon, a free man of color, is captured and assumed to be an escaped slave, he finds himself living a nightmare. For the next twelve years he works tirelessly trying to convince different masters that he is a free man, wrongfully enslaved, all while performing the back-breaking labor expected of slaves at the time.

A truly harrowing view into slavery in the south, Solomon doesn’t hold back when sharing his experiences. From the unsanitary living conditions, to being treated as a beast of burden, being chained and sold, and taking lashes from a leather whip, you get the full experience of life on the plantation.

Abraham Lincoln is one of the most beloved and influential American presidents to have ever served. While he is the face of what happened during his presidency, his true genius comes from his ability to put together a team. Lincoln did not pick friends or political teammates to be in his cabinet, but rather a collection that represented the full breadth of political views of the time.

While they argue and fight often, it is the collection of their individual talents and strengths that has earned them a place in the cabinet. In what has been called the most unusual presidential cabinet of all time, Lincoln builds a powerful political force that allows him to end a civil war, put into motion the end of slavery, and build a nation back stronger than ever before.

CS Lewis is a personal hero of mine, and he has a very honest tone throughout this look into his early life. He starts with his childhood where he and his brother created their own worlds while playing together, and their religious upbringing. When he is sent to boarding school, he struggles to find himself, and loses his faith in the process. He really applies himself in learning Latin and reading the classics, even having a tutor who would assign him large sections of literature to translate into English.

He has built himself into a very logical and thinking man, and it is his relationship with other writers of his time that leads him to take another look at his relationship with God. He approaches it with a skeptics mind, and finds himself as, what he calls, the most reluctant convert.

While no argument for or against God using only logic is perfect, his path away from God and his slow return, and resulting fervor, is a powerful testament of Lewis’s faith and the basis for all of his vast library of written works.

This biography was extremely well researched, and shows Martin Luther King as the whole person that he was. He was a powerful figure in and the face of the Civil Rights Movement, but was also human and deeply flawed, as we all are. It gives a balanced view of both his astounding accomplishments, as well as his human foibles, and bring MLK back from the untouchable place he was put in and into a more accessible plane. King was an inspirational figure, being tracked and possibly hunted by his own government, he was committed to his cause even to the point of death.

This biography is the only one written since the release of the FBI’s files on King, showing us a deeper look into the life of this powerful head in a fight for human rights.

Cheryl finds her life in disarray when, in a short period of time, she loses her mother, comes to terms with her drug addiction, and has a marriage fall apart. She decides to change her name, uproot herself, and start over in life, and there is no better place to start than hiking the Pacific Coast Trail.

At times along the trail she is alone and deals with inner battles as she reinvents herself on the trail. At other points along the trail, she meets up with other hikers and they travel together, creating a community of hikers. After losing her way, and her boot, Cheryl finds herself along the trail, and emerges a woman reborn, and ready to face the world anew.

Ron Chernow is known for his biography of Alexander Hamilton that sparked Lin Manuel-Miranda to write the acclaimed musical, but I have found my favorite of Chernow’s biographies to be that of Ulysses S Grant. What I knew of Grant vacillated between his drunkenness and failures in business to his brutal but effective tactics as a general in the US Civil War, but this book puts together a full picture of his life, and shows us all the powerful and beautiful things he was able to accomplish in his life.

Really, this book is a redemption of the name of Ulysses S Grant from the tarnish accrued through years of public opinion and scrutiny. It shows his years in the presidency as he tries to continue the work of bringing true freedom to the African Americans, including meeting with Frederick Douglass, and his efforts to crush the influence of the Klu Klux Klan, showing that being a hero doesn’t have to come from a place of grandeur.

Thomas Edison is known for the invention of the electric light bulb, but that was not his only accomplishment. In fact, he was so driven to make a name for himself that he had over 1,000 inventions patented, and others he left unprotected for the benefit of modern medicine.

Often overlooked is an obsession with recording music that followed Edison for over fifty years, as he tried and failed and succeeded and improved and tried again with different modes of recording music and voice that is covered at length in this book. The book also seeks to put to rest the feud between Edison and contemporary inventor Nikola Tesla, showing evidence of their admiration for each other through letters and documents from Edison’s personal collection.

Beautifully written and well informed.

This book has a lot to offer- the story of a boy who loses everything and his efforts to find himself, an inspiring sports story about a group of boys that learn to come together as and form a real team, and a story where people from the US win out over Adolf Hitler.

While I generally avoid sports books, personally, this one stood out to me as a book I shouldn’t pass up because of personal hang-ups, and I am glad I listened. The stories of each rower on the team coming from different backgrounds and places in life to form this gold-winning team was inspiring, as well as the moment where they truly start working together as a team and learn that they will accomplish more together than they each could on their own, is a beautiful lesson for life.

Elissa Wall grew up in a polygamous sect in Utah, going to the church school and learning from FLDS leaders like Reuben and Warren Jeffs. When her father is stripped of his priesthood, her leaders transfer Elissa and her mother to a new home, one led by a man with his priesthood still intact. Elissa’s older brothers leave the sect, and she starts struggling with the teachings herself.

At 14, she is forced to marry her cousin, even after her objections to the prophet, Reuben. She lives for years in an unhappy marriage, doing all she can to get away from the man she married, until she finds a way out. When leaving would mean abandoning her mother and younger siblings, can she really do it?

A book about cancer feels out of place in a list for biographies, but the way Mukherjee treats the subject is very biographic in nature. He tracks cancer from its first known appearances, this book highlights people through history who have battled illnesses we now know to have been cancerous. We see a historic mastectomy when Queen Atossa of Persia instructs a slave to cut her infected breast off, and see the modern advances we have made in curing the disease, through chemotherapy medications and radiation, and even some treatments on the breaking edge of science.

For a medical book masquerading as a biography, this book reads incredibly well.

Ben Folds is a very talented musician, and an equally talented writer. He documents his experiences throughout his life, from sicknesses to gas-station altercations while wearing a polka getup, he has a lesson to pull from everything that has happened to him.

Throughout the chapters of the book, Folds teaches you the stories behind the most popular songs, and other stories from his upbringing that put him on the path to become a musical icon. He has a chapter called “Cheap Lessons” where he documents some of his early mistakes, and how he has grown because of those experiences.

He also shares experiences from the stage, like accidentally falling headfirst off the front of the stage during a show in Japan, to the song he has been requested to not play the most often, and what happened when he played it anyway.

Full of humor and wry observation, this book is a light-hearted map to life.